Getting our education system back on track is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it!
Eight years later,
we are still crying out for help.
NCLB was served on a platter of hope and garnished with good intentions.
No matter how pretty you try to make it look, sooner or later the rotten smell will come creeping out around us.
So, what can we expect for our education system? What does Obama have up his sleeve? Will it work?
On NCLB:
These past years will be remembered for misguided policies and missed opportunities.
We still have no real strategy to compete in a global economy. Just think of what we could have done.
We could have made a real commitment to a world class education for our kids, but instead we passed "No Child Left Behind," a law that - however well intended--left the money behind and alienated teachers and principals instead of inspiring them.
I want to take us in a new and better direction.
It’s time for new policies that create the jobs and opportunities of the future--a competitiveness agenda built upon education, and energy, innovation and infrastructure, fair trade and reform.
This agenda starts with education. A highly-educated and skilled workforce will be the key not only to individual opportunity, but to the overall success of our economy as well.
We can not be satisfied until every child in America--and I mean every child--has the same chances for a good education that we want for our own children.
---President Barack Obama
Teachers:
Is it too late? Our teachers have been held prisoner in their own classrooms.
They have been criticized, scrutinized, and drug blindfolded through the mud.
All these years that we literally snatched their livelihoods, dangling it above their heads, just out of reach. Of course they’ll be ecstatic to regain their classrooms but are they willing anymore?
Are apologies coming to late?
I have a better question.
Are apologies coming at all? I hope, for the sake of our children, that our teachers find, once again, the reason they became teachers
to begin with.
I hope they are able to dig deep and uncover the passion they once had as trainers of our world leaders, doctors,
lawyers, presidents, writers, builders, designers, and every imaginable field of interest a person might choose.
Teachers are the most underappreciated, underpaid, unnoticed, martyred social group.
Here is what we are telling our teachers, and our whole country about our teachers.
Teachers are paid according to skill. That is why teachers are one of the lowest paid professions.
Teachers are just glorified babysitters. The good news is they make more than daycare workers and get more vacations.
If you believe any of the above statements, you are a victim of environment.
Congress? President? Lawyers? Doctors?
These are considered the top career choices. The pay alone is enough to do it.
I think we have it inside out and backwards.
The most important, irreplacible career in America is Teaching.
Oddly enough, considering the above, teachers are also the lowest paid.
Is this not ironic?
Without teachers there would be no congress, no president, lawyers, doctors or any other area of study.
They would not exist. Yet we pay the lady who trains the president, quizzes the lawyer, helps the doctor, and teaches men to function in
congress the pay of laundry service, housekeeper, or taxi driver. Teachers raise leaders of tomorrow and they should be noticed as such.
< OBAMA ON TEACHERS:
So, what does Obama have up his sleeve?
Will he arrive at the table with a proposition worthy of our teachers?
Or will his plan come to little to late to make a difference?
Soon, Obama will stand face to face with those who hold the very future of our children in their hands.
America is no longer very tolerant of backbiting. He's going to have to put his money where his mouth is, or just put his foot in his mouth.
I will keep you up to date with the latest as it becomes known.
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